Robotics Seminar

Robotics seminar on Sept 29 is on communication in multi-robot and robot-human team. The speaker is Stephanie Gil from MIT CSAIL. Come join us to hear about exciting research in robotics. Pizza is free!!

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When: Sept 29, 12:10 pm - 1:00 pm. **Pizza at 12:00**

Where: Kingsbury N 101

Speaker: Stephanie Gil, Research Scientist, MIT CSAIL (will be joining Arizona State University as an Assistant Professor)

Title: "Communication in Robot-Robot and Human-Robot Teams”

Abstract: In order for multi-robot systems to work well in practice they must be able to perform one particular task very reliably:

information exchange. Information exchange is essential for coordination with humans and with other robots. Along these lines, I will present a novel algorithm for sensing communication with higher accuracy and resolution than what was previously attainable for small agile robot platforms; using only a single off-the-shelf Wi-Fi antenna and local robot motion. I will show that the ability to use communication, not only to transmit messages but also as a physical signature for each transmitting agent, opens the door to many extensions and applications in multi-robot systems. In addition to establishing adaptive ad-hoc networks, I will discuss an application to cybersecurity in multi-robot teams. Our work shows that each transmitted message by a given robot can be used to provably discern whether that robot is malicious or benign in the context of a Sybil Attack; where malicious robots can spoof or spawn false identities to gain a disproportionate influence in the network. Finally, I will touch upon our most recent work of using human EEG signals for communication in human-robot teams.

Bio: Stephanie Gil is currently a Research Scientist at MIT. Her research interests are in multi-robot control, distributed optimization of ad-hoc communication networks, cybersecurity for multi-robot teams, accurate indoor positioning, and communication for human-robot collaboration. Her past research experience involves work on several NASA projects including the Mars Exploration Rover Team, and an international collaboration for the Future Urban Mobility Project at the National University of Singapore. Stephanie Gil received her B.S. from the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department at Cornell University in 2006, her M.S. (2008 under Prof.

Brian Williams) and Ph.D (2014 under Prof. Daniela Rus) in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT.